Case Planning & Control Department

 

Situation

Company X produces packaging materials and is part of a larger organisation with sites all over the world. The implementation of BPCS started in 1998. BPCS is an ERP application, developed and delivered by SSA, an American software house, and belongs to the larger ERP systems in the world.
The production process exists out of the extrusion of semi-manufactured products and the converting of these semi-manufactured products to end products. The raw materials for the extrusion process are issued in bulk. An important functionality for the Planning & Control Department is the registration of the machine hours, inclusive the downtime, and the waste material registration.

Problem

The registration of the used raw materials has to be done according to a specific formula that back-flushes the components based on the average output, the actual usage and the the component list. BPCS doesn't offer a possibility to do this automatically. That is why company X was forced to do it manually. Due to the large numbers and complexity of the formula, this is a time consuming job.
The standard functionality of BPCS offers the possibilities to register the machine hours and the waste materials, however this is a labour-intensive job.

Mission

Develop a customized application against low costs and with less influence on the standard application.

Result

After the consultant of De Moer Project Services visualised himself of the way of processing and the problems, he made, in cooperation with the company, a set-up of how the registration of the machine hours and the waste material can be done as easy as possible. The focus was on the simplicity of input and the integration of the several parts.
The next step was to find a solution to integrate the developed application with the standard BPCS application. Due to the complexity of the concerning BPCS modules, it was practical not possibly to re-engineer the standard functions to the designed set-up. On advise of De Moer Project Services, the company choose to use the BPCS EDI functionality. The final solution is an application for inserting the data on an easy and quick way. Due to the Semantic Gateways, present in the BPCS EDI module, it is now possible to sent the data to BPCS and process it as if it was inserted directly with the standard BPCS functions.
With this solution De Moer Project Services fulfilled the mission. Due to the short realisation time the cost could be kept relative low. By using the standard BPCS functions, the impact on the standard application was nil.